


Planes

by Theoroark



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Eye Trauma, Families of Choice, Gen, Halloween, Let Gabe be a weird unfuckable zombie vape stunt 2kNow, Team Talon (Overwatch), Team as Family, body issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 13:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12583252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theoroark/pseuds/Theoroark
Summary: After a mission goes wrong, Sombra has some questions. Reaper would rather she left his bathroom.This was supposed to just be a "Gabe & Sombra are the Overwatch-verse's Ron & April" thing but then it took a Halloween-y turn.





	Planes

“Would you fire me if I took a selfie with you right now?”

 

Reaper gritted his teeth and stared straight ahead. Which was, unfortunately, directly at Sombra’s purple knees. The deserted outpost they had attacked had slightly more turrets than was expected. And so while he had still gotten the job done, he had taken more damage than was anticipated, leaving him unable to fully regenerate.

 

Meaning that he had been reduced to a torso on top of a slowly roiling cloud of zombie cells, unable to reach the laptop they had come here for in the first place. Meaning that he had had to call Sombra for backup. Meaning that she was now attempting to open her camera app without him noticing.

 

“I would do worse,” he said flatly, and she rolled her eyes and closed out of the application.

 

“I’m just saying. You look like a sock puppet.”

 

“Get what we need, and get us out of here.”

 

“Okay, okay, geez.” She shoved the laptop under her armpit and held open the metal door. “Drop ship’s about a mile away due east.”

 

“Sombra.”

 

“What?”

 

Under his mask, he closed his eyes and resisted the urged to literally sink into the floor. “You need to carry me.”

 

She stared at him in bafflement. “What? No. Can’t you just do that smoke monster thing, just vape along behind me?”

 

“Not for a mile, I can’t.”

 

“Well, I can’t carry you for a mile! I don’t even know if I can carry you at all! You’re very…” she gestured aimlessly at the smoky fog around him. “…diffuse.”

 

“Look. Either you carry me to the drop ship, or you find me someone to drain the life from in the middle of the Godforsaken Gobi Desert.”

 

“…we passed some cows, would that work?”

 

“Do I look like a cow?”

 

“No, but you kind of look like a munchkin.”

 

“Either you carry me, or I kill and drain you, regenerate, and walk back my damn self.”

 

“A very _cranky_ munchkin,” she said, rolling her eyes again. “Alright. Give me a minute, I think I have a solution.”

 

She left and Reaper quickly realized that she could easily outrun him and leave him stranded, and that she had correctly identified his threat as toothless. But she did come back within a few minutes.

 

But she came back with a wheelbarrow.

 

“You can’t be serious.”

 

“Well, I can’t exactly give you a piggyback ride.” He said nothing and she sighed. “Can you at least get in on your own?”

 

He let his body descend into its wraith form and settled into the bed of the wheelbarrow. “Move out.”

 

Sombra picked up the handles, grunted, and immediately ran him into the doorframe.

 

“Sombra!”

 

“You’re literally half a ghost! How are you this heavy!”

 

“Oh my God.” He braced himself on the edges. “Just… go.”

 

-

 

He was able to regenerate as soon as he got back to base. It had gone smoothly enough, and though he had been a bit sloppy in his hunger, he had only slightly overindulged. And unlike other times when that had happened– when the resulting Paget’s disease had left him with an immovable, fully fused skeleton, or when clumps of painful tumors had kept him in surgery for an entire day– this time the excess regenerated cells had manifested solely as an extra eyeball and some long finger nails.  


 

The nails were easily clipped down and the eye was a shallow thing, no nerves around it and only one point of muscle attachment. He should go to the med bay, prevent infection, but he could take care of it so much faster than they could.

 

So of course Sombra came in– uninvited and unannounced– as he was holding a pocket knife up to his face. And of course her reaction had been an unimpressed “Gross,” and to hop up onto his bathroom counter.  


 

He set the knife down and leaned on the marble. “What do you want, Sombra.”  


 

“Did you sterilize that thing first at least?”

 

“I’m busy. Get to the point.”  


 

“Okay, okay.” She rolled her eyes. “I got a question. Why didn’t you do the smoke monster thing back to the ship?”

 

“I told you, it was too far away–”

 

“Yeah, that’s bullshit.” He looked over at her quickly and glared when she giggled. “Sorry, that thing just keeps flopping around every time you move your head– anyway. I thought I remembered it, and when I checked the tapes, I was right. After the monkey fried you in Gibraltar–”  


 

“Genetically engineered gorilla.”

 

“–after that, you went all villain from Fern Gully all the way through the Watchpoint, back to the jet. That’s almost a mile, easy. What gives?”

 

He looked at himself in the mirror and brought the knife back up to his cheek. It did not make her leave, of course, but it was worth a shot.

 

“It’s very difficult to do that,” he told her. He sunk the tip of the knife into the socket and she frowned.  


 

“Okay, that seems like bullshit too. I’ve read your file. They made it so the decay signal would be instinctive. Make sure you could get out of danger fast. I’d think regenerating would be the hard part.”

 

“It is.” He kept his eyes fixed on the mirror, but focused the bright red failsafe sensors embedded in his brain towards his periphery, on Sombra. She looked confused, and she did not look like she was leaving. He sighed.

 

“It’s difficult because it is very easy to fall apart and hard to rebuild. When I’m out of this body, it’s easy to forget what it’s supposed to be. The longer I'm out of it, the harder it is to go back.”  


 

The knife slid through the flimsy wad of ocular muscle and he turned to look at Sombra in earnest. She was still frowning. “I don’t expect you to understand,” he said, and she snorted.  


 

“Right, right, of course. Because you’re the only one whose body was drastically altered. How silly of me.”  


 

Sombra waved a hand over her face, sending a ripple of invisibility across her arm. He set the knife down and considered her. She had never flinched from any of the grotesque things that happened around him and in him. He had always ascribed that to her upbringing in La Medianoche. Overwatch had had a minimal presence there, but he had been on the ground for a bit. Had detained nine year olds in Los Muertos war paint, had broken up fights over rat meat, had smelled the impromptu mass cremations that came as every inch of grave filled up. He assumed that whatever deformities and atrocities his body grew, Sombra had seen worse.

 

His leniency towards her had always come from a mix of pity and guilt. He had assumed her insistence on treating him as an equal, her pointed friendliness, came misguided from a place that was, if not as self-centered, at least as impersonal. He may have been mistaken.

 

He stood watching her and waited. The eyeball sat precariously in its socket. She looked down at her lap and wound some hair around her finger.

 

“I mean, I had more of a choice than you did, I guess,” she said. “But it was weird. It is weird. I see and hear and feel things other people don’t. I go around scratching off viruses, tuning out holo signals, all these little unconscious things, and every so often it hits me that the people around me aren’t doing them, that it’s just me. It’s like I’m living on a plane that’s just slightly off parallel to everyone else. It’s weird. I don’t know.”

 

The sensors moved around the bathroom, back to the mirror. They were his last defense if every semblance of brain was disintegrated, little chips that told him shape and infrared color and sound and which people he was not allowed to kill and drain. When he had gone that long stretch in Gibraltar, bits of his mind had dripped off until that was all he was left with. When he had finally gotten to eat again, he had been frightened as he was dragged back up to all the noise and responsibilities of human existence. As a wraith, he could sink below that plane, and it was simple there.

 

“I guess it’s not quite the same,” he said. Sombra looked up at him and blinked.

 

“Yeah. I guess not.”

 

She kicked her heels aimlessly and Reaper turned back to the mirror. The eyeball fell out with a soft squelch sound and landed in the sink. Reaper closed his remaining eyes and Sombra attempted to muffle her laughter.

 

“So uh, the weird crater in the side of your face–”

 

“Do you have any suggestions?”

 

“Fill it up with play doh or something?” Despite himself, he smiled, and the sensors picked up her smiling too. “It’s cool, Gabe. You do an alright job of regenerating. Always look like the same gross old man.”

 

“Thanks. You always look ridiculous. What's your excuse?”

 

She jumped down from the counter and slapped him on the back. He took pride that the muscle did not give and the skin did not flake off. She looked down into the sink. “Hey, can I keep this?”

 

“Sombra. What the fuck.”

 

She shrugged. “I want to send it to someone I don’t like.”  He laughed. 

 

“You know what? Knock yourself out.”  


 

“Thanks, Gabe!” She fished the eyeball out gingerly and held it carefully with her long, cybernetic nails. “Uh. Is it okay if I borrow a cup to carry it in.”

 

“No it is not.”

 

“I could have left you in that desert to rot. Well, rot more, I guess.”

 

“…use one of the plastic ones at least.”

 

“I’ll try.” She trotted out of the bathroom and Reaper could hear her rummaging through his cupboards. He watched her, but the sensors swung back to the mirror. He gently touched the now empty socket and some of the flesh crumbled under his fingertips. He put the knife back in its drawer and turned out the lights, leaving only the red glow of the sensors, before following Sombra out.

**Author's Note:**

> "Oh Gabe's a bunch of nanites" "oh Gabe totally looks normal he was just having a bad day when Ana took off the mask" "oh Gabe doesn't constantly smell like death" let him be terrible you cowards!!! Anyway goth shit aside Gabe & Sombra are what happens when you put Ron & April and Holt & Gina in a blender I don't make the rules.
> 
> My tumblr is @tacticalgrandma if you want to talk there.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading this, and any comments/kudos would mean the world to me <3


End file.
